The Wild Reed

Friday, February 24, 2023

Kimi Djabaté

Something very special this evening for “music night” at The Wild Reed.

It’s the music video for “Yensoro,” the lead single from Bissau-Guinean musician Kimi Djabaté’s latest album, Dindin, released worldwide today! . . . I’m hoping to pick-up my copy of it tomorrow at Electric Fetus.

I was first introduced to Djabaté’s beautiful and mesmerizing Afro-beat/blues music via his 2009 album Karam – which is playing as I write this.

Djabaté is a guitarist, percussionist and balafón (African xylophone) player from Guinea-Bissau, a former Portuguese colony in West Africa. Although now based in Lisbon, Portugal, Djabaté was raised in Tabato, a village in Guinea-Bissau known for its griots, hereditory singer-poets whose songs of praise and tales of history and legends play an essential role in West Africa’s music and social life.

A griot by birth, Djabaté’s music has been described as “enchanting and melodic, with touches of Afro-Latin swing accenting the gentle sounds of the balafón.” Along with the kora (African harp), the balafón is one of my favorite musical instruments.

So without further ado, here is Kimi Djabaté with “Yensoro.” It’s followed by the fascinating liner notes from Djabaté’s previous (and third) album, 2016’s Kanamalu.

[Kimi Djabaté’s music] strengthens his place among the griots who keep alive and present the centuries-old Mandingo traditions of West Africa. . . . [Djabaté] is also a songwriter who imbues the roots of the music of his ancestors with subtle inflences from other music genres such as blues, gospel, soul and even Portuguese fado.

There’s a clear historic link between the art of the griots and the development of the blues, and therefore also rock and contemporary musical genres worldwide. In his documentary series The Blues, Martin Scorsese said: “(In the arts) the greatest truth is that everything – every painting, every movie, every play, every song – comes out of something that precedes it. It’s a chain of human responses. The beauty of art and the power of art is that it can never be standardized or mechanized. It has to be a human exchange, passed down hand to hand, or else it’s not art.”

Kimi Djabaté is a more-than-perfect example of these words: his music faithfully follows the principles of the culture to which he belongs; yet at the same time it belongs to him alone, and him and his studio and road colleagues. His words tell similar stories to thousands of other ancient griot stories – the call for justice and peace, honor of ancestors and close relatives, respect for women – but applied to his own life, his reality, his country: the demand for democracy, harmony and peace in Guinea-Bissau; the mournful eulogy of his father; a tribute to his mother and his daughter; or the appeal to griot colleagues to never give up this profession.

Kimi Djabaté was born in 1975 – the year of independence for Guinea-Bissau – in the village of Tabato where his ancestors, who were griots who originated in Mali, had settled for decades. His music features traditional instruments including the balafón, kora and water drum, alongside guitars, bass and drums. It’s music that travels constantly between joy and sadness (and many other feelings throughout). It is an art, in the words of Scorsese, which is never standardized or mechanized; and which is always a human exchange.

– António Pires
Excerpted from the liner notes of
Kimi Djabaté’s 2016 album Kanamalu

Thursday, February 23, 2023

From the Palliative/Spiritual Care Bookshelf

This evening as part of my "From the Palliative/Spiritual Care Bookshelf" series, I highlight a book that isn’t actually on my bookshelf. But thanks to a recent review of it, I’m thinking it soon will be.

First things first: This series highlights the wisdom found on my bookshelf at work, and as most reading this would know, my “work” since September 2018 has been that of a palliative care interfaith chaplain (or spiritual health provider) in a hospital in the north-west metro of the Twin Cities of St. Paul/Minneapolis.

In this ninth installment of my series I share a review by Frank A. Mills of Phyllida Anam-Áire’s A Celtic Book of Dying: The Path of Love in the Time of Transition.

This review was first published on Frank’s excellent website, The Oran Mór Journal, and is reprinted at The Wild Reed with his permission.

_____________________

Watching with the Dying,
Traveling with the Dead

A review of Phyllida Anam-Áire’s,
A Celtic Book of Dying

By Frank A. Mills
When I was a pastor and had to deal with bereavement or minister to those on their death bed, I always struggled with what to say, what to do. And the liturgy and actions of both the funeral service and committal left me cold. Frankly, I failed the dying, the dead and those mourning.

One of the beliefs of Celtic Christianity that attracted me is the Celtic understanding of the soul. Among those beliefs concerning the soul was the belief in the transmigration of the soul as it moved from the realm of this-world to the realm of the other-world. For the Celts, whether in myth or Christianity there is a rhythm of life, a pilgrimage of coming and going. Within this rhythm from life to death, each movement was celebrated. Both celebration and ritual, and all the more so, with the migration of the soul.

I was intrigued when I first saw this book by Phyllida Anam-Áire, A Celtic Book of Dying: The Path of Love in the Time of Transition, especially when I noted that she had trained with Elizabeth Kübler-Ross and has worked with the sick and dying.

The book is esoteric. The author claims to have been given the “Teachings from the Cauldron of Death and Dying” by the goddess Brigit. (She took on “Anam-Áire” – “soul-carer” – after her vision). Nevertheless, putting aside the esoteric element, the book does offer us much to consider when it comes to ministering to the dying and mourning. The author digs into the rhythm of life from the Celtic perspective and expands the old Celtic custom of “watching with the dying and traveling with dead.” This is a tradition that speaks in in holy-whole way to being fully with the dying and mourning the dead. One reviewer called the author’s words a “revival” of the Celtic tradition, and considering that we have lost the old way of watching with the dying and traveling with the dead in our Western Christian tradition, to reclaim this tradition is in indeed a revival of an old way. And this is exactly what Phyllida Anam-Áire seeks.

Where I think we have failed in our Western dealing with dying is that we have failed to open our hearts to dying. Beginning my eighth decade. I know this to be a struggle. I have so much yet that I want to do. In spite of that I must accept the fact that I am in the process of dying and one day will die. Can I open my heart to that fact? Or can my loved ones open their heart to that fact? Can we embrace our coming death with an open heart? With this question as a state fact, “Opening our Heart to Death, the author begins her thinking on watching with the dying and traveling with the dead.

As Phyllida Anam-Áire explores the path of love in the time of transition, from the opening of our heart to the potential of death to migration of the soul, she opens up the Celtic understanding of death and dying, and the accompanying ritual and celebration.

No matter where you fall along the lines of Phyllida Anam-Áire’s esoteric experiences and thinking, this book offers much to those of us who are dying (and we all are) and to those who care for the dying, as well as to those who officiate the committal.

I wish, perhaps, that there was a less esoteric book written about the Celtic idea of dying, but A Celtic Book of Dying is what we have, and I heartedly recommend that you read it before you have to deal with death.

A Celtic Book of Dying is divided into six sections, preceded by the author’s own story. The first section deals with dying in the Celtic tradition. The second is more personal, making us think about our own dying process and death. Before we can help others through the dying process, we must learn to embrace our own dying. After that, we can help others deal with their own death and that of their loved one. Part three and four offer helpful advice to that end. I particularly like the rituals suggested in part three. Rituals such as, the blessing of the body, or the burial of wedding rings. Part five reminds us that birth and death are all part of the natural process. Something the Celtic people vividly understood. Part six is “Stories from the Heart of Death.” The first story is moving, it is about a daughter birthing her mother into a new life, as the mother lays dying. The story reminds us that death is nothing less than a new birth, an incarnation if you will, into a new spiritual flesh.

Throughout A Celtic Book of Dying there are suggestions of things that we might do – rituals – that aid in both the process of dying and the mourning of the dead.

A Celtic Book of Dying is in reality about each us. We are dying, and it would behoove us to learn how to embrace our coming death with an open heart of love. Death, after all, as A Celtic Book of Dying so aptly demonstrates, is nothing more than a new adventure, a joyful one, and all part of the ebb and flow, the coming and going of our essential being.

Phyllida Anam-Áire is a former Irish nun, a writer and therapist who works exclusively with the sick and dying. She trained with Elizabeth Kübler-Ross. Here other work is The Last Ecstasy of Life: Celtic Mysteries of Death and Dying (Findhorn Press). She lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.

To visit The Oran Mór Journal, Frank A Mills’ extensive and insightful website on Christian and pre-Christian Celtic spiritual wisdom, click here.

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• From the Palliative/Spiritual Care Bookshelf – Part I | II | III | IV | V | VI | VII | VIII
• Arthur Kleinman on the “Soul of Care”
• Chaplaincy: A Ministry of Welcome
• Interfaith Chaplaincy: Meeting People Where They're At
• Spirituality and the Healthcare Setting
• World Hospice and Palliative Care Day
• Resilience and Hope
• George Yancy on the “Unspoken Reality of Death”
• “Call Upon Those You Love”
• Yahia Lababidi: “Poetry Is How We Pray Now”
• The Calm Before the Storm
• Out and About – Spring 2020
• A Pandemic Year
• Out and About – Autumn 2021
• Difficult Choices
• On the 2nd Anniversary of the Coronavirus Pandemic, Words of Gratitude and Hope

For more on Celtic spirituality at The Wild Reed, see:
• Celtic Spirituality: “A Fluid, Transmutable Affair”
• Mistwalking
• Holy Encounters Where Two Worlds Meet
• The Mysticism of Trees
• The Prayer Tree
• At Hallowtide, Pagan Thoughts on Restoring Our World and Our Souls
• In This In-Between Time
• Cernunnos
• Beloved and Antlered
• Integrating Cernunnos, “Archetype of Sensuality and the Instinctual World”

Photo of the Day

Related Off-site Links:
Steady Snow, Howling Winds Rattle Southern Minnesota – Minnesota Public Radio News (February 23, 2023).
Snow and High Winds Bring Covered Roads, Deep Drifts, and Transit Delays – Bring Me the News (February 23, 2023).
Bald Eagle Maintains Vigil Over Eggs Despite Snow Covering – Bring Me the News (February 23, 2023).
How Much Snow Fell in Your Area? See Snowfall Totals Across Minnesota – Matt Mikus and Kaila White (MPR News, February 23, 2023).
A Look at How the Snowstorm Impacted Minnesota – Angela Davis, Danelle Cloutier, Samantha Matsumoto, Maja Beckstrom and Nicole Johnson (MPR News, February 23, 2023).
As Snow Winds Down, Cleanup from Multiday Storm Begins Across Minnesota – Minnesota Public Radio News (February 23, 2023).
Are Minnesota’s Winters Getting Snowier? Well, Yes, and No – Dan Kraker (MPR News, December 22, 2022).

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Photo of the Day – February 3, 2023
• Photo of the Day – January 20, 2023
• After Record-Breaking Snowfall, a Walk Through the Neighborhood
• A Wintry Mix of Snow and Freezing Rain
• Solstice Storm (2022)
• A Blizzard of Epic Proportions (2020)
• The Spring Blizzard of 2018
• Winter Beauty (2017)
• Winter Storm (2016)
• A Winter Walk Along Minnehaha Creek (2013)
• Winter Storm (2012)
• Wintering
• Brigit Anna McNeill on “Winter’s Way”
• Winter Light
• Saaxiib Qurux Badan – January 4, 2023
• Photo of the Day – December 23, 2022
• Winter . . . Within and Beyond (2020)
• Winter . . . Within and Beyond (2019)
• Winter . . . Within and Beyond (2017)

Image: Michael J. Bayly.

Wednesday, February 22, 2023

Pope Francis on Lenten Fasting

Tuesday, February 21, 2023

Carnival: “A Necessary Release of Pagan Expression in a Christianized World”

Today is Shrove Tuesday (also known as Mardi Gras), the last day of Carnival, a Western Christian festive season that occurs before the liturgical season of Lent.

Carnivalesque/Shrovetide events typically take place during February or early March. In a number of places around the world, members of the LGBTQI community have become a visible part of Carnival, imbuing these annual celebrations with a unique perspective and a deeper meaning that harkens back to Carnival’s indigenous European (i.e., pagan) roots and thus an emphasis on renewal through transgression and upendment. (Halloween, it should be noted, has been similarly reclaimed by queer folk.)

Wikipedia says the following about present-day Carnival and the pagan roots of this festive season.

Carnival typically involves public celebrations, including parades, street parties and other entertainments, some of which combine some elements of a circus [and/or gay pride]. Elaborate costumes and masks allow people to set aside their everyday individuality and experience a heightened sense of social unity. Participants often indulge in excessive consumption of alcohol, meat, and other foods that will be forgone during upcoming Lent.

The characteristics of the celebration of Carnival take their origins from ancient European festivals, such as the Greek Dionysian (the Anthesteria) or the Roman Saturnalia. During these festivities, there was a temporary release from social obligations and hierarchies to make way for the overthrow of order, joking and even debauchery. From a historical and religious point of view, the Carnival therefore represented a period of celebration, but above all of symbolic renewal, during which chaos replaced the established order, which, however, once the festive period was over, re-emerged new or renewed and guaranteed for a cycle valid until the beginning of the following Carnival.

From an anthropological point of view, Carnival is a reversal ritual, in which social roles are reversed and norms about desired behavior are suspended. During antiquity, winter was thought of as the reign of the winter spirits; these needed to be driven out in order for summer to return. Carnival can thus be regarded as a rite of passage from darkness to light, from winter to summer: a fertility celebration, the first spring festival of the new year.

The following excerpt from Cassell's Encyclopedia of Queer Myth, Symbol and Spirit by Randy P. Conner, David Hatfield Sparks and Mariya Sparks explores the queer dimension of Carnival.

________________________

A. Orloff writes of Carnival, “Nothing can resist this tidal wave of juggernauting chaos as it turns our ordered world on its head. . . . [T]his is a magical time outside of time in which one and all are changed, everything is reversed, inverted. . . . Through orgiastic excess and folly, through the embrace of the opposite within us, through the baptism of frenzied chaos we are reborn”

The association of homoerticism and transgenderism with the carnivalesque is an ancient one. In late antiquity, Christian authorities commenced their attempt to control or abolish carnivals, which they correctly perceived as celebrations of the exiled gods. “The remains of heathen superstitions of all kinds are forbidden,” the Quinisext (or Trullan) Synod found it necessary to declare almost seven hundred years after the triump of Christianity: “the festivals of the Kalendar, the Bota (in honor of Pan), the Brumalia (in honor of Bacchus), the assemblies on the first of March, public dances of women, clothing of men like women, and inversely, putting on comic, satyric, or tragic masks, the invocation of Bucchus at the winepress, etc. . . . [A]ll these activities are forbidden.”

Despite these efforts to destroy Carnival, however, the phenomenon, including its expression of transgenderism through transvestism, persisted. Indeed, in many sectors during the Middle Ages, Carnival was quietly acknowledged as a necessary release of pagan expression in a Christianized world. In the words of Mikhail Bakhtin, “the carnival processions . . . were interpreted as the march of the [officially] rejected pagan gods.”

Monday, February 20, 2023

Happy Birthday, Buffy!

– Image: Akasha Rabut for the New York Times
(November 2022)

Singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie turns 82 today.

Happy Birthday, Buffy!

As regulars readers will know, I’ve long admired Buffy Sainte-Marie and enjoyed her music. Indeed, I find her to be a very inspiring figure. (I even chose her song “It’s My Way” as my theme song when I turned 50 in 2015!)

Left: With Buffy after her August 26, 2016 performance at The Dakota in Minneapolis.

I especially appreciate and am inspired by Buffy’s passion and purposefulness – and by the way she blends her art and social activism. I’ve seen her four times in concert, and had the privilege of meeting and talking with her on three of these occasions. She’s creative, articulate, warm, and funny – a very human human being.

Buffy’s most recent album is the award-winning Medicine Songs (2017), about which Buffy says the following.

[Medicine Songs] is a collection of front line songs about unity and resistance – some brand new and some classics – and I want to put them to work. These are songs I've been writing for over fifty years, and what troubles people today are still the same damn issues from 30-40-50 years ago: war, oppression, inequity, violence, rankism of all kinds, the pecking order, bullying, racketeering and systemic greed. Some of these songs come from the other side of that: positivity, common sense, romance, equity and enthusiasm for life.

I really want this collection of songs to be like medicine, to be of some help or encouragement, to maybe do some good. Songs can motivate you and advance your own ideas, encourage and support collaborations and be part of making change globally and at home. They do that for me and I hope this album can be positive and provide thoughts and remedies that rock your world and inspire new ideas of your own.

Above: Buffy and guitarist Anthony King performing at the Big Top Chautauqua, Bayfield, WI on Saturday, August 27, 2016. (Photo: Michael J. Bayly)

In celebrating Buffy today at The Wild Reed I share the trailer to the PBS American Masters’ documentary, Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On, released last November. It’s followed by excerpts from Lindsay Zoladz’s November 21, 2022 New York Times profile of Buffy. Enjoy!

[Buffy’s] buzzy performances [at the famed Gaslight Cafe in 1963] led to a deal with Vanguard Records; a year later, she released her indelible debut album, It’s My Way!, which featured “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone,” along with a few other songs that were destined to be covered by countless artists across generations: the stirring anti-war ballad “Universal Soldier” and the harrowing “Co’dine,” an early and unfortunately still relevant tale of opiate addiction. Plenty more modern standards would follow later in her career, including romantic fare like “Until It’s Time for You to Go” (Elvis and Priscilla’s wedding song, apparently) and the ’80s pop hit “Up Where We Belong” from An Officer and a Gentleman, for which Sainte-Marie won an Oscar – the first ever awarded to a Native American.

Still, Sainte-Marie said, “It wasn’t about careerism at all.”

“I wanted to write songs that would last for generations,” she said. “I didn’t care whether I ever had a hit. I was trying to write songs that were meaningful enough to enough people so that, like an antique chair, people would dig it, appreciate it, take care of it and pass it on, because it had value and wasn’t going to fall apart.”

In one sense, that has certainly happened. Sainte-Marie has become incredibly influential to artists of many different ages and genres: Joni Mitchell, Robbie Robertson, Neko Case, the Indigo Girls, Steppenwolf’s John Kay and the classical musician Jeremy Dutcher are all vocal admirers. “She’s a massive bright light and a guide to so many,” the Polaris Prize-winning Indigenous musician Tanya Tagaq, who collaborated with Sainte-Marie on a 2017 song, said in a phone interview. “She was that even when she was young, but now that she’s older, it’s almost like she’s laid the foundation to let us raise our voices so that we can be heard.”

But many of Sainte-Marie’s fans also believe she hasn’t quite gotten her due, especially in the United States. Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls – whose rollicking cover of Sainte-Marie’s 1992 anthem “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” has long been a staple in their set list – said in a phone interview, “To me, she’s a household name.”

“But she didn’t get that career that Dylan or Joni or even Joan Baez and some of the other folk singers of her era did,” she continued.

The director Madison Thomas’s lively new documentary Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On, though, makes the case for Sainte-Marie’s continued importance and offers a welcoming primer on Sainte-Marie’s life as a songwriter, performer and activist. Saliers said the timing is fortuitous for a new audience to come to Sainte-Marie’s music: “She started recording in the ’60s, but we need her now more than ever. I think that people in this country are seeking meaning in their music in a way that they haven’t for a long time.”

. . . Despite all of the challenges of her life, Sainte-Marie’s infectiously hopeful energy and radiant smile seem impermeable to cynicism and despair. “I don’t like misery of any kind,” she said. “So if something starts bothering me, I either put up an umbrella or I go inside. I do something about it, because I’m really uncomfortable being unhappy. I try to keep my nose on the joy trail.”

To read Lindsay Zoladz’s article in its entitety, click here.

And finally, here’s a great 25-minute interview with Buffy from last year.

For The Wild Reed’s special series of posts leading-up to the November 10, 2017 release of Medicine Songs, see:
• For Acclaimed Songwriter, Activist and Humanitarian Buffy Sainte-Marie, the World is Always Ripening
• Buffy Sainte-Marie: “I’m Creative Anywhere”
• Buffy Sainte-Marie Headlines SummerStage Festival in NYC’s Central Park
• Buffy Sainte-Marie, “One of the Best Performers Out Touring Today”
• The Music of Buffy Sainte-Marie: “Uprooting the Sources of Disenfranchisement”
• Buffy Sainte-Marie: “Things Do Change and Things Do Get Better”
• Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Medicine Songs

Sunday, February 19, 2023

When the Divine Feminine Intimidates Insecure Men

Writes Meg Slay . . .

I don’t know who added the green notes, but I added the ones in yellow. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If the divine feminine intimidates you, don’t waste her time. If nurturing your children is emasculating, don’t have any.

A woman needs a partner who is her equal. No woman wants a man who makes her feel less than. Frankly, if you’re that insecure, you need to work on yourself.

Step up, self-question, and evolve.

Related Off-site Links:
Singer Rihanna’s Baby Boy Joins Her and A$AP Rocky on the Cover of British Vogue – Suzanne Sng (Straits Times, February 16, 2023).
Rihanna Reborn: How a Megastar Became a Mother – Giles Hattersley (British Vogue, February 15, 2023).
Shine Bright: Rihanna, the Super Bowl, and Performing While Black and Pregnant – Janell Hobson (MS Magazine, February 14, 2023).
Five Times Rihanna’s Style Was Unapologetically Feminist – Braudie Blais-Billie (Billboard, January 23, 2017).
An Introduction to the Dark Feminine – N’Diah Love (Let’s Talk Sweet, December 29, 2020).
Everything You Need to Know About the “Divine Feminine” – Nina Kahn (Bustle, June 25, 2021).

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Kittredge Cherry on the Queer Goddess Origins of the Feast of the Assumption
• Jesus Was a Sissy
• Elizabeth Johnson and Images of God
• Reflections on the Overlooked Children of Men

Saturday, February 18, 2023

Michael Meade on “Slowing Downwards”

Writes Michael Meade . . .

“Slow” and “down” are modes of the soul; they are connective modes, ways of keeping connected to oneself and to one’s environment. “Slowing downwards” refers to more than simply moving slowly, it means growing down towards the roots of one’s being. Instead of outward growth and upward climb, life at times must turn inward and downward in order to grow in other ways. There is a shift to the vertical down that re-turns us to root memories, root metaphors, and timeless things that shape our lives from within. Slowing downwards creates opportunities to dwell more deeply in one’s life, for the home we are looking for in this world is within us all along. The lost home that we are seeking is ourselves; it is the story we carry within our soul.

For more of Michael Meade at The Wild Reed, see:
• Soul: The Connecting Force in Life
• The Way of Love and Healing
• Where Soul Would Have Us Go

See also the previous posts:
• Awakening the Wild Soul
• Trust and Surender: “The Soul’s Foundation”
• Thomas Moore on the “Ageless Soul”
• The Soul’s Beloved
• Brigit Anna McNeill on Hearing the Wild and Natural Call to Go Inwards
• To Dream, to Feel, to Listen
• Honoring the Dark While Celebrating the Light
• Thomas Moore on the Circling of Nature as the Best Way to Find Our Substance
• “Radical Returnings” – Mayday 2016
• Balancing the Fire
• A Sacred Pause
• Aligning With the Living Light
• Mystical Participation
• Returning the Mind to God
• The Beauty and Challenge of Being Present in the Moment
• Being the Light
• The Mysticism of Trees
• Mistwalking
• Holy Encounters Where Two Worlds Meet
• The Prayer Tree
• Cosmic Connection

Thursday, February 16, 2023

Undone

If you ever need someone
to shield you from the rain,
like a river I will run,
I would always be the one.
For I’ve seen your magic rise
like a phoenix starting to fly.
In the tender arms of our love
We’d be undone

If you ever need someone
to guide you through the storm
I would cross the mighty tide
where the sky and sea divide.
For my lover’s heart is strong,
when it comes to love’s tender thorn.
In the arms of our love
We’d be undone.

– Adapted lyrics by Michael Bayly
of Kiki Dee & Carmello Luggeri’s song, “I’d Be Undone”
(from the 2022 album The Long Ride Home)

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Allow Everything to Rest Right Now
• Saaxiib Qurux Badan – February 14, 2023
• Saaxiib Qurux Badan – January 16, 2023
• Saaxiib Qurux Badan – January 4, 2023
• Saaxiib Qurux Badan – August 25, 2022
• Saaxiib Qurux Badan – February 13, 2022
• Saaxiib Qurux Badan – November 25, 2021
• Just One Wish
• Saaxiib Qurux Badan – June 29, 2021
• Blue Yonder
• Somalia Bound
• My Love, “Return to the Root of the Root of Your Own Soul”
• Adnan . . . Amidst Mississippi Reflections and Forest Green
• Amoureuse

Image: Saaxiib Qurux Badan (“Beautiful Friend”), Minneapolis, MN – Michael J. Bayly (2/16/23).

Quote of the Day

The American economic system, with its excessive corporate greed and concentration of ownership and power, destroys anything that gets in its way in the pursuit of profits. It destroys the environment. It destroys our health. It destroys our democracy. It discards human beings without a second thought. It will never provide workers with the fulfillment that Americans have a right to expect from their careers. Instinctually, we know this. But we don’t talk about it in these terms – the terms that can frame out an argument for something different. Something better. To get that something better, people have to confront the system itself.

– Sen. Bernie Sanders
Excerpted from “Anti-Union Capitalism
Is Wrecking America”*
The Nation
February 16, 2022

* From the recently-released book, It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, by Senator Bernie Sanders, with John Nichols (published by Crown, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC).

Related Off-site Links and Updates:
Sen. Bernie Sanders Is Embracing His Anger. A New Book Details What He’s Angry About – Steve Inskeep and Jojo Macaluso (NPR News, February 21, 2023).
Bernie Sanders on His New Book and Capitalism – Bridget Read (New York Magazine, February 17, 2023).
Bernie Sanders: “Oligarchs Run Russia. But Guess What? They Run the U.S. as Well” – Tim Adams (The Guardian, February 19, 2023).
Bernie Sanders’ New Book It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism Tops Charts on First Day – Oscar Hartzog (Rolling Stone, February 21, 2023).

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Marianne Williamson: “We Must Challenge the Entire System”
• Bernie Sanders: “Now Is the Time to Make Democracy Work”
• Celebrating Tuesday’s Progressive Wins in the Midst of the Ongoing “War for the Future of the Democratic Party”
• Progressive Perspectives on Sen. Joe Manchin’s Refusal to Support “Build Back Better”
• Bernie Sanders: Quote of the Day – July 1, 2021
• Something to Think About – January 21, 2021
• Hope, History, and Bernie Sanders
• Capitalism on Trial
• Richard Wolff on the Necessity of Transforming Capitalism
• Something to Think About – November 28, 2014

Tuesday, February 14, 2023

Saaxiib Qurux Badan

The way you feel
like nobody’s child
when the night closes in
on an empty sky

The way you feel
like nobody’s child
Brother, wipe the tears
from your eyes

A message written in the stars
A voice inside that longs to say,
we’re so close, just a breath away
from the future that we crave

So raise your glass, my friend,
the prison gates are open
There’s a freedom train that’s running
if we want to take a ride

Sheltered in this house of cards
I lie in wait for calmer skies
But I believe a deeper love
will lead us to the light.

The way you feel
like nobody’s child
Just a trick of the candlelight

The way you feel
like nobody’s child
A deeper love will lead us to the Light

Brother, wipe the tears
from your eyes

– “Like Nobody’s Child”
by Kiki Dee and Carmello Luggeri
(from their 2005 album The Walk of Faith)

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Saaxiib Qurux Badan – January 16, 2023
• Saaxiib Qurux Badan – January 4, 2023
• Saaxiib Qurux Badan – August 25, 2022
• Saaxiib Qurux Badan – February 13, 2022
• Saaxiib Qurux Badan – November 25, 2021
• Just One Wish
• Saaxiib Qurux Badan – June 29, 2021
• Blue Yonder
• Somalia Bound
• My Love, “Return to the Root of the Root of Your Own Soul”
• Adnan . . . Amidst Mississippi Reflections and Forest Green

Image: Saaxiib Qurux Badan (“Beautiful Friend”), Minneapolis, MN – Michael J. Bayly (2/14/23).

A Vibrant Relationship

Writes Yung Pueblo on what makes a relationship vibrant. . . .

Two people who seek to know, love and heal themselves as individuals will have harmony flow between them as a couple. Control creates tension, but trust gives them space to be their own person and opens the door for vulnerability. Calm communication, clear commitments and the willingness to support each other’s happiness makes the union vibrant and strong.

See also the previous posts:
• What We Crave
• The Longing for Love: God’s Primal Beatitude
• The Holy Pleasure of Intimacy
• To Be Alive Is to Love

• No Altar More Sacred
• To Know and Be Known
• To Be Held and to Hold
• What We Mean By Love
• Like a Sure Thing
• Love as Exploring Vulnerability
• Sex as Mystery, Sex as Light (Part I)
• Sex as Mystery, Sex as Light (Part II)
• A “Truly Queer Theory” on Sex
• Intimate Soliloquies
• Dew[y]-Kissed
• The Gravity of Love
• Passion, Tide and Time
• “Make Us Lovers, God of Love”
• The Art of Surrender
• Real Holiness
• Vessels of the Holy
• Love as “Quest and Daring and Growth”
• Relationship: The Crucial Factor in Sexual Morality
• Lovemaking: Pathway to Truth, Harmony and Wholeness
• The Many Manifestations of God’s Loving Embrace
• Meeting (and Embodying) the Lover God
• An Erotic Encounter With the Divine
• Our Lives as LGBTQI People: “Garments Grown in Love”
• “There’s Light in Love, You See”
• Love at Love’s Brightest
• Liberated to Be Together
• It’s You . . .

Image: “Lovers on a Sofa” by Deni Ponty (1992).

The Wild Reed

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Saaxiib Qurux Badan

A Vibrant Relationship

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